The Yellow Glass

by Claire Ingrams

  I blushed to the roots of my damp hair, overwhelmed with embarrassment to hear my uncle say those words out loud. However, nobody paid me the slightest attention because Magnus had shuffled over to where Uncle Tristram was standing, by the cat, and had curled his big hands into tight fists, like dumbbells at the end of his stiff, black arms.

  “And have you?” Asked Magnus.

  My uncle’s eyes gleamed, “What if I have?”

  Magnus drew back his elbow and aimed a punch at my uncle’s right cheekbone. It was a smart, staccato kind of a movement, straight from the boxing ring, that would have taken most of us by surprise. However, Uncle Tristram had fought in the war and, no doubt, been trained in all kinds of deviant ways by the Secret Service and he deflected the blow just as it was about to connect with skin and bone; he swung Magnus’ arm right round his back, rather as if he were jiving with him, and then tripped him up in one, fluid movement, so that Magnus was face down on the floor before he knew what was what, with the boss sitting comfortably on top of his pinioned arm.

  The silence that followed was only broken by the cat, who started to make the most appalling, rasping noise - like rusty cogs cranking into gear - which must have been his way of purring. Unnerved, my uncle and I both stared at the animal, who launched into a lip-smacking washing routine that seemed rather traitorous to his owner. As if the identical thought had occurred, Uncle Tristram jumped up and extended a hand to Magnus. Not surprisingly, Magnus declined to take it, but got himself up, in a clumsy fashion, rubbing his wrist. His face had gone bright red. I felt I should say something calming, but couldn’t think what it might be.

  However, “I like your friend,” Uncle Tristram remarked, oddly, and then, “I’d be interested to see more of your magazine, Magnus.”

  Magnus snorted in disbelief, “Oh, yeah?”

  “No, I really would. It sounds like an intriguing publication. Actually, my mother is involved in your sort of field. You may have heard of her. Leonora Thetford? She’s always been to the left side of the spectrum.”

  Magnus’ mouth fell open.

  “Wha . .? Leonora Thetford the politician?”

  Uncle Tristram nodded.

  “Bloody hell,” Magnus whistled, as if he just couldn’t believe that such a thing might be possible. “Leonora Thetford’s my idol, man. She’s my heroine. She’s the coolest politician on the entire planet.”

  “Mmm,” Uncle Tristram agreed. “She’s quite a lot of people’s cup of tea. Speaking of which . .”

  The room had warmed up and we were ranged around Magnus’ paper-strewn table with chipped mugs of steaming tea in hand. The earlier part of the day was beginning to seem far-fetched in the extreme; fading back to that bizarre dream-world that just couldn’t be squared with real life. Yes, we were finally warm and cosy and all getting on like a house on fire (a trip to the pub had even been mooted), when my uncle asked to use Magnus’ telephone. Magnus indicated the ancient Bakelite number screwed to his wall.

  “Have you got an extension? I’ll use that one if you don’t mind.”

  There was one in the other room and Uncle Tristram went to make his call. I was rather surprised that he wanted to speak in secret because something in A Paler Shade of Red - or in Magnus himself, or, perhaps, in the efficient use he’d made of his right fist - had persuaded the boss that he could be trusted with the bare bones of our story.

  Magnus, for his part, had lit up with excitement. He was as incandescent as his hair. In fact, the only times that I’d seen Magnus that enthused, he’d either had a half bottle of Hennessey in his jacket pocket, or Chet Baker[7] had been on the gramophone, or both.

  “You, a spy!” He kept repeating, as if it were the oddest concept ever. “You, a spy!”

  “And why shouldn’t I be?” I was getting slightly cross.

  “You! Quirky Rosa Stone with her long hair and her bright dresses and her earrings! I can’t believe it!”

  This was a fairly accurate description of my usual clothes, I suppose (which you haven’t seen, of course, since I’d been working undercover as Miss Dodd), but still puzzling. What did he mean, ‘quirky’?

  “What do you mean, ‘quirky’?” I asked. “What kind of word is that when it’s at home?”

  He burst out laughing, “I’m sorry, Rosa, but you are. Right quirky. For a start, nobody says stuff like that any more; ‘when it’s at home’. You make me laugh, man.”

  I could’ve begun a rant about the idiotic way he called everybody ‘man’, regardless of gender, as if he’d grown up in San Francisco and not Hull. But I decided against it. The truth is that lots of people have thought I was peculiar, for as long as I could remember, because I’ve never fitted in. It’s just a fact. I’m a Jewish girl who grew up in the Kent countryside, for starters. My uncle’s an Honourable and my mother began life below stairs, in service. Then, one could factor in the many schools I had to go to because of the war. And my crazy, extrovert father, the noisiest baker ever. And my abilities, of course. So you see, I’ve just had to be me and I’d thought that Magnus was one of the few who could understand that. But I’d got it wrong, as always.

  So I didn’t say anything at all. Not that he noticed.

  “You, a spy!” He said, again. Then he nodded his head at the door, “I can believe he’s a spy, he’s got it written all over him, once you know. I wouldn’t trust him an inch, man.”

  “Indeed?” Uncle Tristram re-appeared. “How very interesting.”

  I let Magnus stew; I felt he deserved it.

  “My wife’s meeting us at the pub. She’s bringing the car. The Quiet Dog, did you say it was?” He had borrowed Magnus’ undertaker’s coat and was shrugging it on. Somehow, he made even that disreputable garment look rather elegant. “She may be a while, but that shouldn’t matter, should it? I could do with a beer.”

  I caught up with the boss while Magnus was locking his front door. He was striding up Lettice Street towards the subdued glow of lights leaking through the frosted-glass windows of a mean-looking pub. It looked like the front parlour of somebody’s house (somebody I didn’t particularly want to visit).

  “I thought you were telephoning HQ, Uncle?”

  “Mmm . . what?” He was miles away. “Oh yes, I did that.”

  “What did they say? Do we have new orders?”

  “We?” He stopped dead in his tracks. “I may have orders, Rosa, but you do not.”

  I couldn’t believe it; he was going to leave me out of it. I’d swum the Thames. I’d handled radioactive glass (although, I was not about to confess to that; in fact, I was trying not to think about it at all). I’d put my life in the service of my country.

  “But . .”

  Magnus overtook us and stormed through the door of the public bar (Magnus would no more sit in the saloon than vote for Churchill or Eden[8]), and Uncle Tristram strode in after him, as if I simply didn’t exist.

  I went to follow them in and . . hesitated on the threshold. I just hesitated for a heartbeat. I took a step backwards and I closed the door with care, leaving the two men on the inside and me . . on the outside. Then I began to run.

  4. The Girl’s Done a Bunk

  Damn the girl. Damn and blast the girl to kingdom come. You want to know what I thought? Well, that was it. I’d been a complete lunatic to have involved her in the first place. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have form. She’d reverted to type and done a bunk.

  “Rosa Stone, a spy!” Her journalist friend commented. “You must have been off your head, man.”

  And now I’d also involved some new species of bohemian from the North of England.

  Initially, we thought she was visiting the Ladies. Well, I did; we didn’t discuss it, obviously. We ordered our pints and carried them back to a table. I’d bought Rosa a small shandy. Time passed while we debated the Marshall Plan[9] and, if I thought about my niece at all, it was to assume that she was doing something with her queer mop of brown hair, or powdering her nose.

  “The
y got us right where they wanted us,” Magnus was becoming increasingly het up. “They gave us money, right enough, but it was all used to buy goods from the U.S. of A. And we’re supposed to be grateful to them, man! We paid for the war in Korea[10], that’s what people don’t get! And it’ll go on and on, so that the world becomes more polarised; it’ll all be Us and Them for evermore and us’ll stand for U.S. more than owt else.”

  He was not without brains, that much was obvious, but what was the alternative? I’d bought a pack of Player’s and offered him one.

  “What about the death of Stalin[11], Magnus? Bring a tear to the eye, did it?”

  “Hey!” He raised his palms in an interesting gesture of fake supplication, “You’re at it, too; if I’m not bowing at the feet of Uncle Sam, then I must be in the pay of Uncle Joe, that’s how you lot think, isn’t it?”

  Yes, I was rather enjoying the conversation, and the ale, after what had been an unnecessarily wearing day. Until I realised that my niece had gone and done a bunk.

  Of course it crossed my mind that they might have abducted her. But that was unlikely. It was possible - all things are possible in my trade - but, as I say, not likely. The man Magnus (who, like most of his tribe, was a crass romantic at heart), came up with a crackpot theory, whereby a Dickensian network of street urchins had been bribed to keep a lookout and report our whereabouts to a criminal mastermind; Rosa having fallen into their net upon the threshold of the Quiet Dog public house. It was an amusing idea (for the Artful Dodger substitute a spotty teen-ager who bought his clothes from Woolworths), but that was all it was. Besides . . I knew my niece.

  We made a desultory effort to look for her in the local streets, but she’d have been miles away by then. Magnus seemed prepared to spend the entire night searching for her, if need be, and was distinctly unhappy when we turned back to the Quiet Dog. He wanted to carry on charging about in the most ineffectual manner (as amateurs usually do), but it made far more sense to wait for my wife to arrive with the car and then conduct a comprehensive sweep of the area. Of course, the journalist was pretty far gone on her - that much was plain to see (and, in retrospect, I suppose that must have been the reason I’d let him in on the game).

  Anyway, eventually I managed to drag him back to the pub and we waited a bit.

  “Why don’t you go home and put your paper to bed, Magnus?” I tried to get rid of him. “If you give me your telephone number, I’ll let you know how she is in the next few days.”

  “How could you do this?” The ants were still in his pants. “Put her in danger like this, man? You’re supposed to be her bloody uncle!”

  He had a point, although he didn’t need to know it. I was a lot more rattled than I was letting on. We were in a hole, one way or another. In fact, we were in an entire rabbit warren’s worth of holes, several of which had been dug by my missing niece: dropping Arko’s glass, taking us straight to the haunt of Arko’s young mole. But being rattled doesn’t do in my business. I tried another tack.

  “What do you know of her other friends, Magnus? Are there any others living round here that you know of?”

  He stopped maundering on for a minute and gave it some thought.

  “I don’t know. I mean, she’s got friends, man, but I’m not sure where they live. Rosa kind of dips in and out of her friend’s lives.”

  I could imagine; she sounded just like a spy. How close were they, I wondered - my unusual niece and this clumsy northerner? How well did he really know her?

  “She’s always been something of an escape-artist,” I let drop. “Were you aware of that, Magnus?”

  He looked surprised and then, thoughtful. I daresay his heart had known, even if his brain hadn’t.

  “You’ll remember the Cambridge fiasco, of course, but that was only the latest in a long line of bunks. She was particularly active during the war years, apparently; never stopped running away from kindly people she was evacuated to, or boarding-schools, or what have you. She once stowed away on a ship and nearly drowned when it got wrecked! She’s an interesting girl, in many ways. I’ve only known her for the last ten years - since I married her aunt, Kathleen - but she’s been a source of considerable interest to me.” I grinned, “A source of considerable anguish to her poor parents, of course, but there you go . . aren’t we all?”

  I couldn’t think why I was talking so much; unless it was to conceal how rattled I actually was. Thank God Kathleen arrived promptly, or who knew what sad and sorry tales the beer - and the kickback one gets from a botched operation - might have encouraged me to dredge up from my own childhood.

  “Ah,” she’d tooted the horn, “that sounds like my lift.”

  I stood up and removed his coat.

  “Please, take this back. Many thanks. Just give me your telephone number will you? There’s no need to write it down, I’ve a head for them.”

  I could tell he was reluctant to abandon the chase and - if he was any kind of journalist - he’d be even more reluctant when he cast eyes upon my rather well-known wife, so I tried to make a clean exit. Even so, I thought I’d better give him my number, too, in the remote chance that Rosa made contact with him first.

  “You can reach me at FLAxman 4390. Now get back to work. A Paler Shade of Red needs you, Magnus.” I stopped at the pub door. “Do you have a surname, by the way?”

  “Arkonnen,” he said. “With a k. It’s Finnish, man.”

  I’m not often surprised these days, but that did the trick. HQ hadn’t mentioned any relations living in London and I was prepared to swear that they would have done, had they known of any. I’d been handed a file a yard wide on Arko Arkonnen’s background and nothing of the kind had cropped up.

  More to the point, had Rosa known that her friend was an Arkonnen? The issue was problematic. I’d observed that Rosa didn’t always know what she knew. I mean, I’m no psychologist, but I’d often noticed that she seemed to have two sections to her brain and the conscious section seemed to lag behind the other, hidden, part, so that, in a queer way, the girl was capable of knowing everything and nothing at all. This being the case, Rosa might well have connected Arkonnen with Arkonnen and yet have known damn all about it. That remarkable brain of hers simply contrived to deliver us straight from the frying-pan into the fire.

  As you will have guessed by now, my niece is a savant. They’d identified her at Cambridge, despite her flying visit. The grapevine had twitched. I hope I don’t sound too self-justifying when I say that I sincerely believed that they might run her, with, or without, me. So, wouldn’t it be better to use her in one of my operations - in a strictly clerical position - where I could keep an eye out for her? Well, that was my thinking at the time. Incredibly, dropping her into Heaviside hadn’t seemed like the act of pure lunacy it turned out to be.

  My wife (a woman of instinct rather than fact), instantly intuited that something was up. She leant across to open the passenger door of her white Austin Princess.

  “Isn’t it a trifle cold for shirtsleeves?” She commented. Then, “Where’s Rosa, Tristram? I thought Rosa was with you?”

  “She’s done a bunk, darling. I think we’d better have a good look for her.”

  Her wide-set, navy blue eyes registered alarm. Had I overplayed it?

  “She introduced me to a man friend of hers and, to cut a long story short, they had words and she ran off into the night in a bit of state.”

  “Really? That doesn’t sound like Rosa.”

  “Running away? You can’t mean that, Kathleen!”

  “No, not the running away; that sounds just like her. I mean the state.”

  “Young love, I suppose. May have jogged something. Touched a nerve.”

  Dear God, I sounded such a fraud. I never could talk about feelings.

  Kathleen adjusted the silk scarf which had slipped a fraction from her smooth, blond hair and the diamonds on her hand flashed (but not as much as her eyes). In the old days, she would have come out with some fabulous expression involving
tripe, or ham, or hogwash. She didn’t do that any more and I rather missed it. Instead, she revved the engine and began to drive.

  The sleet had ceased to fall and the pavements glistened where it had become rain. It was as dark as it ever gets in town, which is to say, not that dark. Kathleen drove as expertly as ever, gliding that great bucket of a car at a serene speed, just slow enough to take a good look around, but not too slow to hold up the traffic or excite attention. Up and down the grids of terraces we went, spreading outwards from Magnus Arkonnen’s flat like concentric circles from a stone dropped in a pond. Men came home from work, children ventured out to play in the streets and we slid past them all, looking for Rosa. We drove down the New Kings Road until it became the Kings Road, passed the theatre crowd in Sloane Square and patrolled all the way around Harrods. Then we doubled back by Eaton Square and made for the Fulham Road, from the borders of South Ken to North End Road market and looped back towards the Embankment: to the river and the power station and the rubbish dump and the mundane streets where Heaviside Import/Export Limited traded deadly glass. It was all singularly meaningless.

  “Oh well,” Kathleen said, “she’s a grown girl, after all. I expect she’s got some money on her.”

  She glanced at me and then into her front mirror.

  “And, anyway, she’s not too far from her flat in Battersea, is she? What’s the betting she’s walked back there? We’ll pop round, shall we?”

  I had a vision of her handbag bobbing up and down on the Thames. And, as for her flat . . I bloody well hoped she hadn’t been so stupid as to return there against my advice.